1) Flyers - no brainer - she should print tons of extra.
2) All she can do is pass on the feedback the other agents provides. She can't force them to comment on your home.
3) The number of homes she shows you is going to depend on the criteria you give her. If only 3-4 homes are on the market that fit what you are looking for, she should let you know that. If you are looking for something specific, that might be the case. If not, she should be sending you all the listings that meet your criteria.
4)There is no good excuse for missing the newspaper deadline. It is the same every week. Was the newspaper your idea? Many agents don't think they drive traffic anymore.

1. Print a zillion, that's my advice, then the seller can keep the dispenser stocked.

2. what Billl said.
(I my own self have seen listing agents chase after the other agents on Tour begging them to please fill out the comment sheet.)

3. I'm near Dallas, in the Metrotex Association & MLS; don't know how it works elsewhere, but where you are, agents can set up an automatic program to email buyers or other interested persons whenever a listing comes on the market that fulfills certain criteria.

If you're not getting many emails, it's because not many properties that meet your criteria are making it onto the market.

It may be that your criteria are too "tight".
For instance, if you want a 3500 square foot home with at least 5 acres, a pool, barn, & livestock fencing, in a certain school district, & your budget is $300,000...there's nothing any agent can do about the fact that you aren't going to get many email updates!

4. benefit of the doubt-I don't put open houses in the paper at all.
It doesn't increase visibility, & it's very expensive.
I use "Open" signs, the MLS Open House feature, etc.
If I were to plan to use the newspaper, I might very well miss the deadline myself, since I'm not familiar with the mechanics of it.

However, if I were the homeseller & I had prepared the house for visitors & had made plans to be out of my home for the afternoon, & then, only after I sent my agent an email, she asked me if I still wanted to have the Open House...

I'd be offended enough to terminate the listing agreement.

Even if a client has priced the house too high or the house sits in a toxic waste dump, if the agent agreed to do X, Y, or Z, she should do it give the seller enough information to make some sort of decision ("open houses don't work around here & it's a waste of time" or "it won't sell at this price & it smells like monkey doo").

I wish you the best.

Well, she did give you feedback on the agent's tour about the piano and your price - both of which everyone here also gave the same feedback. That's pretty important feedback, especially the price since they said it's at the top range.

I do think you have legit concern about not getting the newspaper deadline and the fact she is not providing spec sheets.

Get one of her fliers, drive down to Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, Kinkos, your local instiprint shop, wherever they do mass printing for cheap, and print up 500 to 1000 on your own dime. Should she print them up and fill the box? Absolutely. But remember, no one, not your agent, not a buyer's agent, no one wants to sell that house as much as YOU do. This is one item that you can take care of for little cost and a few seconds of your time.

If you can do a BETTER spec flier than your agent, make up it up yourself and use that for the outdoor box and viewers reference.

I've never sold a home so have no idea what to expect from our realtor.

You deserve better than what you have been getting. You and your agent are of different mindsets; you want more handholding than she is willing to give.

1. Flyers: you want them, she doesn't and she is foot-dragging to avoid the situation. For the remainder of the time that you use her as an agent, print up your own and put them out.

2. Agent tour. She could have done better with follow-up even if just a verbal run down. The fact that she didn't means that this isn't a high priority to her.

3. Until this house is sold, you are only torturing yourself looking at new homes. When you fire her as your selling agent, she will know that you have fired her as your buying agent.

4. Missing the newspaper Open House deadline. Inexcusable.

Bottom line, start looking for a new agent and when her contract expires, dump her. You will notice her come alive in the weeks leading up to the expiration date. Don't be deceived - she will revert to this level as soon as you renew with her.

I appreciate the advice and have to agree on many points but want to clear up a few.
First, the Open House was her idea. The night we signed the papers to list she said we'd hold it on the second weekend. She knew I ordered flowers to put around my house and also bought bottled water and ice to have on the back porch since it's SOO hot here in Texas right now.
Also, that night she said she'd print fliers and to this day they aren't done so I will work on something myself. I'm a bit tired of waiting for them. :)
What I know about the feedback forms is that she emails them to the showing/touring agents and when she does I get an email showing that she's sent it and when someone responds I also get an email but I've not seen any emails sent to the agents so I assume she didn't send them at all. As I said I've asked her but I'd really like to know MORE about what they thought. I know the piano is an issue for some but I can't do much about it as I won't store it. Hopefully that is the biggest issue and everything else is nice so I won't worry myself over it.
Thank you so much,
Sunny

Hi, Sunny. I feel your pain. My house has been on the market since June 15. I chose a large agency which is not in my town, but not too far. My agent had the brokers open house June 16th. She had 37 brokers and had it catered. She had printed flyers giving the sizes of the rooms and all pertinent info on the house. She had brochures printed with extra photos that were not on the listing. They were really professional looking, I was surprised.

Feedback on the brokers open house was by email. She did not give individual feedback rather gave me a general idea of what they thought. Told me pricing was 50/50, half felt priced a bit high, half thought priced correct. She brought booklets about my area and school system. All of these items are placed on a table in my foyer along with booties for bad weather (no one has ever used them.)

I found the booklets on my area is quite popular. It gives the schedules about after school activites and summer camp. It talks about nursery schools and day care in the area. Frankly, I didn't know so many things were available in my area.

I think she's terrific and we email almost every day. She gives me feedback on each showing which I appreciate.

Every house has some issues and my agent knows how to show my house despite them.

I do not plan a public open house, do not like them and don't believe they do any good. She has pushed me to have one and it is the one area we disagree. But she respects my feelings about it.

I would fire your agent in a minute.

Jane

Your agent should do everythng you ask of her. You don't need all of us to "judge" whether your request is reasonable. If it is important to you to you then the agent's job is to take care of it. Doing all that the client asks differentiates successful agents from marginal ones.

I would fire her today. Do not worry about the listing agreement which is probably at least for 6 months. Type up a formal email listing the duties that SHE agreed to do, and the fact that she has not done them, even after being reminded.
Do not hire another agent until the Termination Agreement is signed by both.
One or two oversights can be understood, but she is beyond that.

Your agent refuses to give you flyers after asking THREE TIMES?
She schedules an Open house and tells you 30 minutes before the appointed time that the ad didn't make it into the paper?

FIRE HER. For all the work she is(n't) doing, you might as well be selling FSBO.

If she refuses to sign the termination agreement then talk to her supervisor and let them know you will report her and the agency to the state realtor board if she doesn't let you out of the agreement. Same thing happened with our buyer's agent. Only she tried to lock us into a ONE YEAR agreement. Yikes. It took a real estate attorney to get her out of our lives.

No more buyer's agents for us. We are using our real estate attorney instead. When we sell, you can be sure we will have our own version of a sellers contract that covers all the points you are bringing up.

She already gave you the feedback from the agents, so scratch that from your list.

But she should have provided the flyers especially since she promised. This means she doesn't follow up. I wonder if she doesn't answer questions about your home from other buyers or their agents...such as promises to check on something and doesn't follow up with an answer for a few weeks. You would never know. But since she doesn't have follow up skills and since she doesn't keep her word, then she is not a good enough agent to sell your home. There are many great agents out there - this is not one of them.

About the Open House - it is downright rude to let you know that issue 1/2 hour before the Open House. I am sure you planned around it for several days. She should have let you know in advance of the issue. I would fire her for this. Although I don't believe much in Open Houses, in this case, she promised you something and didn't deliver.

Get rid of her. I am not sure if this will be that easy to do, based on the listing agreement that you signed.

Jane_ny -- Our house in Tucson sold from an open house.

We DID fire and agent!!! She was terrible!! We put our elderly mom's house on the market and used the next door neighbor who had been campaining for the job. She was fairly new in the business, and we had a few reservations but since she did live next door we felt it would be fine. Low and behold, we find she held the brokers open and didn't tell us she was going to do it (even though we asked that she do so we could straighten out and clean the place). The place was a mess, as we had been packing and clearing out things! The poor agent that was her mentor was horrified and thought that was the way we lived!! He asked if she told us she was holding the brokers open and she said she had!!!!
The next week she set off the alarm system because she left the code in her home (next door!!!!) and my nephew had to run over, intercept the cops and turn it off. He was upset and the agent unprovoked started saying terrible things about our nephews grandfather (my step-dad), who is deceased! Anyway, the list goes on! I got fed up and told her I was unhappy with her. She gave me a flip attitude! I ended up calling her office manager, related the stories and told her I wanted the agent to have nothing to do with our listing, we didn't want her to have any part of the commission, and to place us with the other agent. She was very upset and totally agreed and we got a new agent, her mentor! What a difference! Still haven't sold the home (that's another horror story - buyers making offers, hanging on for months and not really being serious!), but the new agent is professional and we have been happy!

Hi Sunny,

My DH and I are under contract to sell our NYC area condo and are about to go under contract to buy a townhouse in central NJ. Our condo was on the market for just about a month, and we sold for 93% of asking, which I think is about as good as you're going to get in this market.

I attribute it almost entirely to our agent, who hustled and worked hard to market our home and negotiate with our buyer. So, if your agent isn't hustling and you're disappointed with her performance, you should consider looking for a new agent. There are so many realtors out there right now looking for work that there is no excuse for anything less than 100%. This is a tough time to be a seller, and you're paying your agent a lot of $$, so she should be working hard to sell your home!

We tried to sell our condo in 2008 and were unsuccessful, in large part due to the inactivity on the part of our former agent (who had been recommended to me by an acquaintance). We knew that when we went back on the market this year, we needed to find an agent who would be much more aggressive in marketing our home.

I found this agent by reviewing reports of recently sold homes (a local realtor posts these for free on her website; perhaps you can find something similar in your area). I determined that a particular office was doing the majority of sales in my town, and then through a bit more online research I found out who the top seller was in that office. I put two and two together and figured out that the agent must be doing most of the work that his office is doing in my area.

I did ask our current agent about flyers. He doesn't use them (and gave his reasons why), and I decided to trust him on that and not worry about them. However, when we toured homes in the town we'll be moving to, almost every home had a brochure or flyer. So, if that is what is expected in your area, your agent should be providing those. There is NO REASON for you to have to print them up on your own---this is what she gets her commission for---to market your home!

Every agent that I've talked to still posts in the newspaper as a matter of course, even though they all admit that it doesn't really drive many sales their way these days. But again, if that is what is done in your area, then your agent should be doing it.

The two main factors that sell houses right now are proper pricing and excellent marketing. If you are priced at the top of the range, then your agent needs to make up for it with her marketing, convincing potential buyers and their agents why they should take a look and consider making an offer. It sounds like you're at a double disadvantage, and the way to remedy that is probably to fire the agent.

Good luck!

"Every agent that I've talked to still posts in the newspaper as a matter of course, even though they all admit that it doesn't really drive many sales their way these days. But again, if that is what is done in your area, then your agent should be doing it."

Why???

If a marketing tactic doesn't work, why use it?

If you were marketing property yourself, & you knew that internet & yard signs were the most effective tools, would you pay $70 to $150 to advertise in a newspaper for a week-end, at the end of which your advertising would be trashed, composted, or used for kitty litter?

Why?

My guess is the above agents use the newspaper because it brings potential buyers for other properties. Yes, it likely doesn't bring buyers for the property listed in the newspaper, but it brings clients for the agent.

Open Houses are similar - they bring clients for the agents much more often than they bring buyers for that individual property.

Between a newspaper ad and an open house, I bet an agent can get several new clients, or potential clients.

Re: the issue of newspaper ads. Maybe it's a generational thing or a right brain/left brain issue, but I love looking at the papers to see what homes are on the market. We bought the current home because of an ad in our local small town paper. We had been talking about moving for about 10 years and hit open houses on some weekends when they looked interesting in the photos (both in the town paper and our regional papers. There were certain things we wanted in a home that our home did not have - a sunroom and a main floor art studio. We realized early on that if we added to the home we lived it it would overprice it for the neighborhood and we would be wasting our money. One day I opened our local paper, saw a photo of a home (both front shot and back) and was blown away!! It was like love at first sight for both of us. We made an appointment to see if this really did have all we wanted and had the location. It did and we bought it!!

Look, I hear those of you who say print ads are a waste of time. I know we are in the electronic age and so many people are on line (I am also!!!!), but having a photo in a paper still triggers emotions in people.

We have moved in the same CT town three times after being transfered from Long Island, New York. We love the town, as do most people who live in it, have made wonderful connections, and wouldn't think of moving anywhere else when we made those moves! There are also so many people in other towns around us that feel the same way about their town, and do the same thing. Maybe it's CT, but people find a town, fall in love with it and stay!!!